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Dead trains are dead

The morning starts with a dead train at Wellington on the Orange Line, a dead Green Line trolley somewhere on Huntington or South Huntington and a dead train outbound at Maverick on the Blue Line (say, aren't those the T's newest and freshest subway trains?).

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There were two disabled trains. One was around Haymarket and one was on Huntington Ave. Of course, it all happened just as my bus pulled into Haymarket. You could tell something was wrong as it is usually E - C - E - C - E - C at Haymarket, but it was more like C - C - C - E today. A disabled train was on the extra siding track at Northeastern.

And then, my favorite part of the day... my train was short turned at Brigham Circle to fill an inbound "service gap." But here's the thing, there was a train at Fenwood Road when my train was pulling into Brigham! So the inbound train had to wait for my train to completely unload, then change ends, and then let everyone board. Meanwhile the inbound that was at Fenwood is sitting there between the circle and the station just waiting to go. So the short turn not only made the gap longer, it inconvenienced two trains full of passengers. The train that was at Fenwood could have left Brigham before my train got to leave Brigham. So where's the sense in all this?

And this is a regular occurrence. Not amount of "write to the top" has solved this.

Some drivers get it right, but usually when a train runs express because it's late, they waste so much time announcing it over and over that it doesn't save any time. Often they don't bother to announce it's going express before the train stops, which wastes even more time, since people aren't ready to get off unexpectedly.